Contrary to the popular arguments, people who attribute human characteristics to genetic causes are more likely to be liberal than conservative, are more tolerant, and do not have what the study calls "unseemly racial attitudes." I am surprised but not shocked about the first of these. In my limited experience it is mostly conservative sites that will even acknowledge the possibility, and mostly liberals who come over to report that Hitler had racial superiority theories and this is exactly the same thing. On the other hand, conservatives are often in the forefront of attributing human characteristics to culture and also don't like being told that there are strong genetic factors. Scott Alexander suggests that these attitudes are simply related to having more education, which could be so. Alexander also links to an article in Quillette about in-groups and out-groups. Comments are closed, so no fun for me. I think the refutation to Ezra Klein's context-driven truth is straightforward, so I suppose I don't actually need to write that paragraph, though I would like to.
I comment fewer places now. Some sites use FB as the sign-on and I no longer have an account. SSC always has far too many comments per post. Althouse has that problem to a smaller degree. I am not starting new accounts much these last two years.
I wonder if their result is an artifact of the definitions and questions. Liberals are quite willing to attribute racism to skin color (I'm only being half-sarcastic) so it's not like they totally reject the idea of genetics playing a role in non-physical characteristics. The debate is always over the degree of influence. So long as they were sufficiently vague to avoid including certain trigger words I can see liberals agreeing with genetics influencing them. Conservatives seem to be less willing to see a link between culture and intellectual horsepower so even if they do lean towards genetics determining IQ they still might not see an influence. Liberals on the other hand pretty much equate IQ with culture i.e. smart people are culturally liberal. Reality-based community, how facts are biased and all that. Last, determing tolerance and unseemly racial attitudes is going to be highly dependent on what you define as intolerant and unseemly. I'm fairly certain that being racially 'woke' was probably rated as more tolerant than expressing a color-blind approach favored by conservatives, so once liberals scored higher on the genetic influence questions they were pretty much guaranteed to determine the tolerance result.
ReplyDeleteThere's a real-life example of the culture-genetics switcheroo: homosexuality. First it was a "lifestyle choice" which had to be respected, then suddenly it was "totally genetic" and locked in at conception. Now it's just a Fundamental Human Right which must be respected.
ReplyDeleteLiberals are close to 100% likely to attribute sexuality to genetic causes, though gender is supposedly a matter of choice. Still, that’s going to weight the outcome if it was included in the study.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I enjoy about Jordan Peterson is that he's interested in statistical differences between groups, without forgetting to think carefully about whether each characteristic is inherently a good thing or a bad thing. For instance, he observes that men and women vary as a group on a scale from agreeable to antagonistic, but he keeps in mind that too much agreeableness makes for a doormat and too much antagonism makes for a prison sentence. You wouldn't expect to find a wholly useless characteristic in any human group that hadn't bred itself out of existence by now. Unfortunately, his knack for keeping an open mind is somewhat rare, so people go straight from noticing statistical group probabilities to concluding that one group is better or worse than another, skipping the party where we think carefully about what we mean by "better."
ReplyDeleteOr, to be more precise, people leap to the conclusion that anyone noting population differences must be making an invidious distinction at the expense of one of the populations, typically the one that in recent history has had more power or money.
ReplyDeleteTexan, one of the things that causes me to shake my head at the current crop of progressives is their militant effort to sterotype many human behaviors, in complete opposition to their claim to be radical equalizers.
ReplyDelete"Liberals" in the US should be called "Democrats", because for voting purposes the realistic winning choices are Dems and Reps -- there are no "Liberal" or "Conservative" on the ballot.
ReplyDeleteA huge advantage of the Dem PC-bullies is that they claim to be liberal, and tolerant, and shift the definitions to fit the situation they are arguing in. So the inconsistencies in general can be evaded in any particular argument, by the Dem doing the lying, er, talking, at the time.
AVI - you should come by neo-neocon more; I think we see less of your comments recently. Perhaps as more folks reduce their FB, there will be a bit more folk returning to blogs & blog posting.